Donnivan Schaeffer was 22 when Charles Rhines murdered him in 1992 as Rhines burglarized a Rapid City doughnut shop. / Submitted photo

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Heather Shepard holds a puppy at her home Jan. 14 in Rapid City. 'It'll be good when his sentence is carried out,' Shepard said of death row inmate Charles Rhines. 'It needs to be over with.' By Joe Ahlquist / Argus Leader

Rhines attended the funeral, consoled mourners and signed the guest book before fleeing to Seattle to avoid further questioning. He confessed to his roommate at the time, then kept tabs on him to keep him from telling police.

He threatened to murder his roommate’s girlfriend, taunting her with gruesome details of that night and saying he was her boyfriend’s lover.

And when Rhines finally admitted what he had done, the heartlessness of his confession gave a South Dakota detective nightmares.

The lives: Scrambled in various ways since '92

In the two decades since the murder, the lives of his victims have been changed in predictable and unexpected ways.

Peggy Schaeffer thinks of her murdered son every day. Appeals hearings in the Rhines case and legislative bills on the repeal of the death penalty force her to relive the crime. The next round of testimony will happen within weeks.

Sam Harter tried to escape the accusation of being a killer’s lover by acting out with a group of small-time criminals, eventually serving a prison sentence of his own.

Heather Shepard, who became Harter’s wife for a short time, turned to methamphetamine. She also served a prison sentence. She’s been sober for almost 10 years but still fears the man she met at a Seattle bus terminal in spring 1992.

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Schaeffer said justice will not be served for a remorseless three-time felon until he loses his final appeal and faces the sentence a jury gave him 21 years ago.

“They say, ‘Oh, it will give you closure.’ No, it won’t. We’ll still have birthdays and Christmases without our son,” she said. “But we won’t have to go to Pierre. We won’t have to testify anymore. He won’t have beat the system. That’s my goal: He’s not going to beat the system this time.”

The roommate: 'He told me he'd killed once'

Sam Harter was 17 when he met Charles Rhines.

Harter had moved out of a strict religious home headed by his father, a Pentecostal minister.

He got a job at Dig ’Em Donuts, where Rhines was a manager. One day, the teen gave Rhines a ride home and learned that “home” was a motel room.

“I said, ‘Why are you living in a motel?’ ” Harter recalls. “I’d never heard of anyone living like that. He told me what he was paying to live there, and I said, ‘I’d rent out my extra room for that.’ ”

Rhines moved in. Harter learned of his sexual orientation when he and two friends walked into the apartment and saw Rhines watching a male pornographic movie.

“He came into my room later that night and apologized and said, ‘I guess you know I’m gay now,’ ” Harter said.

The next day, Harter joked about with his boss about the irony of having a gay roommate after his sheltered upbringing.

Rhines was fired that week.

“I felt bad,” Harter said. “I never wanted him to get fired.”

About a week later, Rhines came on to him, Harter said, and the two argued amid new tension: Harter was being taunted at work for living with a gay man.

Soon, Rhines told Harter he planned to rob the doughnut shop.

“I didn’t care if he robbed the doughnut shop, because I figured if the cops asked me questions about it, I could answer them and he’d be out of my life,” Harter said.

The murder: 'I got sick. I had to to throw up'

The evening of March 8, 1992, Harter drove Rhines to the shop, knowing his friend was going to commit a crime. An hour later, he picked up Rhines.

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Rhines told him he had killed someone, and Harter said Rhines held a knife to his throat and warned that he would do it again unless Harter stayed silent.

“It was the same knife he killed Donnivan with,” Harter said.

Rhines kept Harter in his sight the next few hours. But when Harter went to work that night, he saw Schaeffer’s body.

“I didn’t know what to think,” Harter said. “Donnivan was my friend. I got sick. I had to go throw up.”

Police arrived and brought in Harter for questioning. Later, Harter called Rhines when he needed a change of clothes. At the sight of his roommate, he “chickened out” from telling police what he knew, Harter said.

Rhines told him that if he had talked, “it would have been my family.”

The two went to Schaeffer’s funeral together, where Rhines wondered aloud whether the killer was there.

Rhines went to Seattle days later to meet up a friend with whom he had been in prison. Police kept questioning Harter, but he was afraid to say anything. His younger brother had begun receiving threatening messages. And on a trip to Minnesota, Harter ran into a friend of Rhines’ and became convinced the killer was keeping tabs on him.

Then, in May, Harter met Heather Shepard, a 16-year-old runaway. When Rhines demanded that Harter come to Seattle that month, he said he would come only if Shephard came, too.

The girlfriend: 'I could tell something was off'

Shepard was excited for the Seattle trip.

“I’d never really been out of South Dakota,” she said. “I had no idea there was a murder investigation going on.”

But when she and Harter got off the bus in Seattle, she was surprised to see the friends they were meeting — Rhines and his prison buddy Matt Mighell.

“I could tell something was off right away,” she said.

Matters worsened. One night, while everyone was drinking, Shepard said, Rhines and Mighell told her that her boyfriend was gay and that he had been with and belonged to Rhines.

That’s when she first heard about Rhines’ involvement in the unsolved murder that had gripped her hometown.

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“He took me in the bedroom that night and told me he’d killed Donnivan. He told me some pretty horrendous details,” she said. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”

The two ex-cons carted the teens around King County, Wash., as they stole copper wire and stripped it to sell for salvage.

One day, when they all were in the woods, Harter later told Shepard, Rhines was ready to shoot her. He and Mighell were beginning to worry that she would talk to police.

Harter wouldn’t let that happen, he said.

“I told him he’d have to shoot me first,” Harter said.

Relief came from police in Seattle, when an officer saw Rhines and Harter arguing outside a motel room one June night in a crime-ridden neighborhood.

“He asked, ‘How old are you?’ and ‘what are you doing in this part of town?’ ” Harter said. “I wish I’d have gotten his name.”

He told the officer he was a runaway and begged him to get Shepard out of the motel room before Rhines killed her.

Rhines told police there was no one there. They found the girl in the shower, where Rhines had told her to hide.

Harter and Shepard opened up to detectives.

“I told them everything I knew,” Shepard said. “Everything.”

The detective: 'The only nightmare' about work

Steve Allender was a 30-year-old Rapid City police detective when he received a call from Washington about his suspect.

By then, Allender was focusing on Rhines as the prime suspect.

The stabbing at Dig ’Em Donuts had not involved forced entry, so he had narrowed his search to former employees who might have had a key. And he knew Harter wasn’t being honest. He also noted an odd statement from Rhines during a March interview. He said he wasn’t returning to Washington, where he had served part of a previous robbery sentence.

But Allender, now Rapid City’s police chief, didn’t have much hard evidence.

A confession by Rhines in June in King County, Wash., shook Allender.

Rhines coolly spoke of stabbing Schaeffer twice, leading him into a storeroom and sitting him on a pallet before applying the “coup de grace” and shoving the knife through the back of the young man’s neck and into his skull.

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“It was evil,” Allender said. “I’ve been in this business for 30 years, and the only nightmare I’ve ever had about police work was about him. I feared him to a great extent.”

In Allender’s dream, he felt a stinging pain the back of his leg and turning to see a smiling Rhines, who’d plunged a knife in.

“It was face to face. He was looking right at me,” Allender said.

The mother: 'All of the sudden I'd be crying'

Peggy Schaeffer was in disbelief when police told her that her son had been stabbed to death. The community’s reaction made it even worse.

“Right away, there was this undercurrent of ‘Oh, this was a drug deal.’ But there was nothing like that. Donnivan didn’t even drink,” Schaeffer said.

Peggy and Ed Schaeffer were worried that the police wouldn’t find the killer. Their son had completed vocational-technical school and planned to marry his high school sweetheart. He was working as a courier in 1992 and waiting for his fiancée to finish school.

In the months between the murder and Rhines’ capture, Peggy Schaeffer “froze” emotionally, living day by day, moment by moment.

“All you can do is what you’re doing, and that’s it,” she said. “I’d be sitting there, and all of the sudden I’d be crying.”

At the packed funeral, she took in the overwhelming support in a daze of grief. She later did television interviews, asking for the public’s help to find the killer.

“I’d be driving on the highway and just looking at people and thinking, ‘How can all these people be driving around like everything is OK?’ ” she said.

Each turn in the case put the murder and her grief back into the spotlight.

“People would come up to you and give you a hug, and that would give you the strength to get through another day,” she said. “But it feels like you’re in a dream. You just want to wake up.”

When prosecutors told her about seeking the death penalty, she and her husband accepted it. “They told us, ‘We think we can get this,’ and we were OK with that,” she said. “You’re too emotional as a victim to make decisions like that. It wasn’t up to us.”

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The fallout: 'It still impacts my life'

Peggy and Ed Schaeffer plan to testify in Pierre when Rep. Steve Hickey introduces a bill to repeal the death penalty in the state.

Every few years, the couple travels to Pierre to offer testimony on similar bills, reminding legislators that their son lost his life just as it started, they lost the hope of grandchildren, and their lives have been forever changed.

Heather Shepard and Sam Harter both say the crime took their youth. The couple married the summer they met, and they have a daughter together. The relationship didn’t last — it was over before Rhines’ trial, where a pregnant Shepard testified.

“We were too young. We were both too young. We’d been through too much,” Harter said.

Shepard agrees. She had no idea how much control Rhines had over Harter.

“I think Sam was so messed up from all of this, and I was so messed up that we never had a chance,” she said.

She was terrified. After hearing of the 1993 prison riots, she was paralyzed by the thought Rhines might escape, find her and kill her.

“He’s the coldest, most heartless person I’d ever met,” she said. “I have no doubt in my mind that he’d do it again.”

Shepard turned to drugs. Her methamphetamine addiction landed her in federal prison almost 10 years ago. She said she’s been sober since then, but old fears surfaced when the attorney general’s office called last year to ask for her input on a habeas corpus hearing for Rhines.

She was in a grocery store when received the call.

“I couldn’t even function,” she said. “I couldn’t remember the PIN number for my debit card.”

The friend: Harter also served prison time

Harter started hanging out with a group of small-time criminals after Rhines’ trial. He had been tagged as Rhines’ lover — something he denies, though he knows Rhines loved him — and he wanted to distance himself from the connection.

“I wanted to be seen with pretty women, and (my friends) were able to make that happen,” Harter said. “I felt like I had to create a different life than what people were painting me as having.”

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He stole checks from his father, and he and his friends forged them. Harter’s name was attached to rooms the group would rent because his record was clean. In 1996, he pleaded guilty to three counts of forgery and received a 17-year sentence. He served four years.

Harter doesn’t blame Rhines entirely for his decisions, but said he can’t help but feel like he would have had a better shot in life if never had met the man.

“I’ve been through a lot because of decisions that were partially mine, partially Charlie’s,” Harter said.

After prison, Harter moved to Missouri to be near his family and became a truck driver. He remarried and had another child a year ago. His daughter with Shepard grew up in Rapid City and married her high school boyfriend. She has a young child, too.

Peggy Schaeffer feels for Shepard and Harter. She also feels for the owners of Dig ’Em Donuts, for her son’s former fiancée, and even for Rhines’ own family.

“I don’t hold anything against them. They’re good people,” Schaeffer said. “There are victims all the way around in this.”